In the last few months, I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time fleshing out some tedious but necessary parts of my game. I realized that since I’m a one-man army, I need the ability to very quickly get all of my ideas out and into a playable form without a lot of process and layers of tools. Unfortunately, the only way to achieve a very seamless workflow is by specializing your tools, which means rolling my own level editor and game formats. These things are nice to have anyway, but I believe that the time I invest in these tools will pay off in even the very first game I make with them. I decided I needed a quick and easy way to import models and other game assets, a scripting language (I chose Lua) for data definition and eventually scripted events and possibly game rules, and a level editor that allows rapid building and playtesting of open 3D worlds.
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